I thought he was just being mean because I was Jewish, but it turned out he was right: I had earned the extra dollar because Quinn had claimed two hours’ overtime for himself and crew — probably, at least in part, on account of my bemused, belated meanderings in quest of dumbwaiters in the cavernous, concrete basements in the Bronx, and then in quest of the correct egress. .
In the old-fashioned, smaller apartment houses and the sedate brownstones, especially those on the north and west side of Mt. Morris Park and others in the neighborhood of the store, deliveries were usually made without benefit of dumbwaiter. When Mr. Klein sent me out with Shea, who drove the Model-T truck that made only local stops, I would revert to an older and simpler form of delivering my groceries. I would climb up the stairs with the apple-box under my arm. I liked that way of delivering groceries much better than I did via dumbwaiter, because that way, there were no agonizing uncertainties and bewilderments, and besides, I might get a tip.
I also got a chance to see how a different class of people lived, refined Gentiles, not like those in the slum I lived in, the “dumps,” as everyone called them: the cold-water flats on East 119th Street, but Gentile people in comfortable circumstances, whose homes didn’t always have a picture of Jesus on the wall pointing to his exposed, crimson heart. Sometimes I would be rewarded by the sight of a dignified gentleman in leather house-slippers and velvet smoking jacket with satiny collar, puffing at a meerschaum pipe. Sometimes, I would be invited into the kitchen by the lady of the house, still wearing her lovely, figured, silk dressing gown. And more than once, while engrossed in my task of unloading the groceries on the kitchen table, I might feel the fingers of a hand run delicately through my hair, and look up at the roguish, dimpled face of a woman who seemed to wonder at herself for doing what she did: “You don’t mind?”
“No, ma’am,” I would assure her in worldly fashion. “Some other ladies did that already.”
“Did they? I’m not surprised. What a woman wouldn’t give for a curly head of hair like yours.”
X
. . He heard a thud in the living room, heard a thud, and couldn’t identify it: “Are you all right?” he called.
“I was just being careless,” M called back. “I’m all right.”
“You fell. Poor kid. What’d you trip over?”
“I won’t tell you.” Her voice was girlish. She had already gotten to her feet and was walking toward the kitchen.
Girlish. The mind singled out the thought amid the welter of recollections of her previous falls, her all-too-frequent tumbles: that time in Florence when they were walking one evening with Mario M, the Italian translator of his novel, when she tripped over some unevenness in the sidewalk and fell before anyone could catch her. Her glasses were broken, her brow and nose lacerated. Foot-drop was the cause, the aftermath of her months’ long immobilization, a quasi-paralysis brought on by an undiagnosable form of myelitis, akin to Guillaume-Barre syndrome. So much had to go before, so many episodes, so much “history” was needed to render with any justice the sketchiest of preambles to the subject of her girlishness, girlishness behind the wrinkled, dear exterior of the grandmother. It was within that girlishness he had achieved his regeneration, such as it was, attained an improved adulthood — what to say? — an image of a self more acceptable, a less repugnant identity.
. . And reached that stage — ironically, always ironically — when he was already within the defunctive zone, the end zone, when again and again thoughts reverted to dead friends, vanished times, lost opportunities. Worst of all, they, those dead friends and vanished times, too, had left so little trace within him, so little enduring deposition of themselves, so that he could accurately recall, substantially recall, the topical contentions, the subject matter, the eddies of difference or agreement or opposition that formed and changed in those days, the chafings and chafferings, the diversions and discontents, the actual content of them, in their detail, with their particular formulations. Ah, he had not listened enough! Most often only simulated listening. He had not been involved, had not come to grips, profoundly, thoughtfully agreed, or passionately disagreed. He had been essentially unaffected.
He thought of Joyce: How many times it had been noted that, by abandoning Ireland in order to embrace the “great universal culture” of Europe, Ireland was nonetheless all he wrote about — confined, parochial Ireland. In short, he couldn’t assimilate the great cosmopolitan “universal” Western culture that surrounded him on the European continent, to which he now had unlimited access. Why? Or why not? Another Irishman, Bernard Shaw, also of Dublin, though not a Catholic, had quit Ireland some twenty years before Joyce, without fanfare, posture or manifesto, but as a practical step, gone to live in England and had exploited easily, without let, Europe’s foibles, mores, divertingly, successfully. In a word he had been able to “use” European culture as a writer, a playwright. Why? Quite simply, perhaps too simply, because he contended actively with current ideas and biases and issues.
Joyce had not, deliberately had not. He skipped Ireland precisely to dodge having to deal with ideology. “Silence, exile, cunning,” borrowed from some religious order, had been his practice (he said). And why had he adopted that rule? He had made a virtue of necessity, in all likelihood. He had become locked into himself, for some reason, even as Ira had become locked into himself, locked into his “mind forged manacles,” to quote Blake. To have striven with him, to have riven them, fought to emancipate himself from his vast ego, might indeed have brought him closer to his touted slogan than the course he took, might not indeed have taken its toll of desuetude. Whereas to accept his hermetic ego, exploit it, projecting his Freudian bonds on Bloom, the nominal Jew, promised him the foremost place in twentieth-century English letters, a promise that was fulfilled. He stored up creative static for one supreme discharge.
And to an incomparably lesser extent, so did he, Ira; he did likewise, who now was left with the realization that the good heart, the kind and affectionate, the discerning, loyal and understanding heart was far more precious than artistic acclaim. Here in this defunctive zone, where he felt himself verging ever closer to all that had vanished, at last came this wisdom, accrued from the woman who would not be deterred from loving him — and with the wisdom won from her came its minion: humility. Pity Joyce — Ira thought in passing — not only did the guy marry a functional illiterate, but unlike Blake, such was the man’s monumental ego he made no effort to raise her to his level, as Blake did, which had he done, might have gone far to restore him to his folk, by her sweet discernment, her intelligent devotion: “In God’s intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage. . ” So said John Milton. One might ponder here whether a meet and happy conversation might not in the end make all the difference between a fruitful and a sterile erudition, between a fruitful reunion with his people, and a sterile dallying with his medium. .
XI
I became knowledgeable about the store, perhaps too knowledgeable — especially about the basement. I knew where every variety of viands was kept, what aisle, what shelf. Only the fresh fruit locked in the icebox, and that musty, spider-webbed wine and whiskey bunker, cross-barred and double-locked and sealed with stamped, leaden seals were beyond my prying — and my tasting. Left alone to replenish stock from newly arrived cartons, whenever possible I nibbled or savored any contents that were accessible, or wicked ingenuity could contrive to make so: a bright cherry or two from a jar of maraschinos, the ineffable briny delights in a wee tin of curly anchovies — which could be opened with its own key — tea biscuits and sea biscuits and dried fruit.